Foreign News
Queen Margrethe II: Danish monarch announces abdication live on TV
Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II has announced her surprise abdication in a new year TV address.
She will formally step down on 14 January, which will be 52 years to the day since she became queen. “I will leave the throne to my son, Crown Prince Frederik,” she announced.
The 83-year-old is the world’s only reigning queen and the longest serving current monarch in Europe, taking the throne after the death of her father King Frederik IX in 1972.
She revealed the decision was made after a period of reflection following surgery on her back in early 2023. “The surgery naturally gave rise to thinking about the future – whether the time had come to leave the responsibility to the next generation,” she said. “I have decided that now is the right time,” she added, and offered her thanks to the Danish public for their support over the years.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen thanked the queen for her service. “On behalf of the entire population, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Her Majesty The Queen for her lifelong dedication and tireless efforts for the Kingdom,” she said in a statement.
“Although the duty and position of regent has been handed down for more than 1,000 years, it is still difficult to understand that the time has now come for a change of throne,” the statement read. “Many of us have never known another regent. Queen Margrethe is the epitome of Denmark and throughout the years has put words and feelings into who we are as a people and as a nation.”
Unlike British royal tradition, there will be no formal crowning ceremony for Crown Prince Frederik, who is 55. Instead, his accession will be announced from Amalienborg Castle in Copenhagen on the day. He will take her place as King of Denmark and head of state in the country – which is a constitutional monarchy – as well as in Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
Queen Margrethe is a popular figure in Denmark, and many Danes had expected her to remain on the throne until her death. “She is to us what Queen Elizabeth was to you,” Danish journalist Tine Gotzsche told the BBC.
Queen Margrethe attended the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, and they celebrated their respective jubilees in the same year. She had not been expected to become Queen when she was born. But when she was 13, Danish law changed to allow women to take the throne.
More than a decade ago, Queen Margrethe reflected that she was inspired by the late British Queen “that I must somehow understand that I must dedicate my life to my nation like she has done, and in that way she has been very important to me.”
The pair had been the world’s only remaining female sovereigns before Queen Elizabeth’s death. Elizabeth reigned for 70 years.
Some also consider her the world’s longest reigning monarch. The Sultan of Brunei has been on the throne for longer, but his country only gained independence in 1984.
She is also the longest-serving monarch in Danish history, after surpassing King Christian IV, of Denmark and Norway, earlier this year.
Affectionately known as Daisy, Queen Margrethe is known for her smoking habits and rejection of mobile phones and the internet – declaring herself “very happy” without them.
Gotzsche said the Danish royal transition is a moment of mixed celebration and sadness.
“She has always been there, she has been ageing with all of us,” she said, but added: “the Crown Prince is in a very good position to take over, the succession is laid out – it’s very logical, and it absolutely makes sense.”
Crown Prince Frederik, like Britain’s King Charles III, is known for his passion for the environment. He has vowed to “guide the ship” of Denmark into the future.
His wife, Princess Mary, grew up on the Australian island of Tasmania and was working as a lawyer when the pair met in 2000.
They are considered by some to represent modern values and have tried to give their four children as normal an upbringing as possible, sending them mainly to state schools.
During her time on the throne, Queen Margrethe continued to work as an artist and was well known for her love of the arts. She also has a passion for archaeology and has taken part in several excavations.
She studied in the UK, spending time at Cambridge’s Girton College and the London School of Economics.
In 1967, she married French diplomat Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, who served as her royal consort until his death in 2018.
Each year on New Year’s Eve, she delivers a speech broadcast on television. This year, aside from the announcement, she also spoke of the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, as well as the importance of addressing climate change.
Facing similar challenges of modern society as other royal families across Europe, the Danish royal family has decided to slim down its number of royals. This led to a very public rift last year after Crown Prince Frederik’s younger brother Prince Joachim’s children were stripped of their royal titles.
(BBC)
Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who snapped one of the most famous photographs taken in outer space, has died at the age of 90.
Officials say a small plane he was flying crashed into the water north of Seattle, Washington.
Anders’ son Greg confirmed that his father was flying the small plane, and that his body was recovered on Friday afternoon. “The family is devastated. He was a great pilot. He will be missed,” a statement from the family reads.
Anders – who was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission – took the iconic Earthrise photograph, one of the most memorable and inspirational images of Earth from space.
Taken on Christmas Eve during the 1968 mission, the first crewed space flight to leave Earth and reach the Moon, the picture shows the planet rising above the horizon from the barren lunar surface.
Anders later described it as his most significant contribution to the space programme.
The image is widely credited with motivating the global environmental movement and leading to the creation of Earth Day, an annual event to promote activism and awareness of caring for the planet.
Speaking of the moment, Anders said: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth.”
Officials said on Friday that Anders crashed his plane around 11:40PDT (1940BST).
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the 90-year-old was flying a Beechcraft A A 45 – also known as a T-34. The agency said that the plane crashed about 80ft (25m) from the coast of Jones Island.
Anders also served as the backup pilot to the Apollo 11 mission, the name of the effort that led to the first Moon landing on July 24, 1969.
Following Anders’ retirement from the space programme in 1969, the former astronaut largely worked in the aerospace industry for several decades. He also served as US Ambassador to Norway for a year in the 1970s.
But he is best remembered for the Apollo 8 mission and the iconic photograph he took from space.
“In 1968, during Apollo 8, Bill Anders offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give. He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves,” Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
Mark Kelly, a former astronaut who now serves as a US Senator for the state of Arizona, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that Anders “inspired me and generations of astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends”.
[BBC]
A Chinese spacecraft carrying rock and soil samples from the far side of the Moon has lifted off from the lunar surface to start its journey back to Earth, according to state media.
The achievement on Tuesday is a world first and the latest leap for Beijing’s decades-old space programme, which aims to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030.
The Xinhua News Agency, citing the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said that the ascender of the Chang’e-6 probe took off at 7:38am local time on Tuesday (23:38 GMT) and entered a preset orbit around the moon.
It described the move as “an unprecedented feat in human lunar exploration history”.
The Chang’e-6 probe was launched last month and its lander touched down on the far side of the Moon on Sunday. It used a drill and robotic arm to dig up soil on and below the Moon’s surface, according to Xinhua.
After successfully gathering its samples, the Chang’e-6 unfurled China’s national flag for the first time on the far side of the Moon, it said.
The agency cited the CNSA as saying that the spacecraft stowed the samples it had gathered in a container inside the ascender of the probe as planned.
[Aljazeera]
China says its uncrewed craft has successfully landed on the far side of the Moon – an unexplored place almost no-one tries to go.
The Chang’e 6 touched down in the South Pole-Aitken Basin at 06:23 Beijing time on Sunday morning (22:23 GMT Saturday), the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said.
Launched on 3 May, the mission aims to collect precious rock and soil from this region for the first time in history. The probe could extract some of the Moon’s oldest rocks from a huge crater on its South Pole.
The landing was fraught with risks, because it is very difficult to communicate with spacecraft once they reach the far side of the Moon. China is the only country to have achieved the feat before, landing its Chang’e-4 in 2019.
After launching from Wenchang Space Launch Center, the Chang’e 6 spacecraft had been orbiting the Moon waiting to land. The lander component of the mission then separated from the orbiter to touch down on the side of the Moon that faces permanently away from Earth.
During the descent, an autonomous visual obstacle avoidance system was used to automatically detect obstacles, with a visible light camera selecting a comparatively safe landing area based on the brightness and darkness of the lunar surface, the CNSA was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua news agency.
The lander hovered about 100m (328ft) above the safe landing area, and used a laser 3D scanner before a slow vertical descent. The operation was supported by the Queqiao-2 relay satellite, the CNSA said.
Chinese state media described the successful landing as an “historic moment”. The state broadcaster said “applause erupted at the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center” when the Chang’e landing craft touched down on the Moon early on Sunday morning.
The lander should spend up to three days gathering materials from the surface in an operation the CNSA said would involve “many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty”. “Everyone is very excited that we might get a look at these rocks no-one has ever seen before,” explains Professor John Pernet-Fisher, who specialises in lunar geology at the University of Manchester.
He has analysed other lunar rock brought back on the American Apollo mission and previous Chinese missions. But he says the chance to analyse rock from a completely different area of the Moon could answer fundamental questions about how planets form.
Most of the rocks collected so far are volcanic, similar to what we might find in Iceland or Hawaii. But the material on the far side would have a different chemistry . “It would help us answer those really big questions, like how are planets formed, why do crusts form, what is the origin of water in the solar system?” the professor says.
The mission aims to collect about 2kg (4.4lb) of material using a drill and mechanical arm, according to the CNSA.
The South Pole–Aitken basin, an impact crater, is one of the largest known in the solar system.
From there, the probe could gather material that came from deep inside the lunar mantle – the inner core of the Moon – Prof Pernet-Fisher says.
The Moon’s South Pole is the next frontier in lunar missions – countries are keen to understand the region because there is a good chance it has ice.
The capsule in the last Chinese moon mission, Chang’e 5, brought back soil and rocks in 2020 (BBC)
Access to water would significantly boost the chances of successfully establishing a human base on the Moon for scientific research.
If the mission succeeds, the craft will return to Earth with the precious samples on board a special return capsule.
The material will be kept in special conditions to try to keep it as pristine as possible.
Scientists in China will be given the first chance to analyse the rocks, and later researchers around the world will be able to apply for the opportunity too.
This is the second time China has launched a mission to collect samples from the Moon.
In 2020 Chang’e 5 brought back 1.7kg of material from an area called Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon’s near side.
China is planning three more uncrewed missions this decade as it looks for water on the Moon and investigates setting up a permanent base there.
Beijing’s broader strategy aims to see a Chinese astronaut walk on the moon by around 2030.
The US also aims to put astronauts back on the moon, with Nasa aiming to launch its Artemis 3 mission in 2026.
(BBC)
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